This
study uses a very simple experimental design to explore how children (ages 3
through 5) use ownership in their explanations about why it is acceptable or unacceptable
for a person to use an object. They do three experiments.

In the first two experiments, ownership is not mentioned to
children, and researchers test whether children bring up ownership
spontaneously in their explanations.

In Experiment 1, researchers
focused on the “right of use”, that is, whether it is acceptable for a certain
character to use a certain object.

Experiment 2 is
similar to experiment 1, but it focuses on the “right of exclusion” (someone
shouldn’t use something because it belongs to someone else).

Experiment 3 provides
children with explicit information about ownership before asking about
acceptability and unacceptability of use.

The conclusions are that, as children grow older, they become
more likely to use ownership to explain why it acceptable or unacceptable to
use an object. 3-year-olds rarely referenced ownership, while 5-year-olds
referenced ownership in almost half of their explanations. 5-year-olds gave
ownership explanations more than any other particular kind of explanation (and
this is not the case in younger children).

4- and 5-year-olds gave ownership explanations at similar
rates regardless of whether ownership was mentioned. However, whether ownership
was mentioned (experiment 3) did influence 3-year-olds: When 3-year-old explained
why it was unacceptable to use an object, they referenced ownership more often
when it was mentioned than when it was not mentioned. 3-year-olds gave more
ownership explanations in the unacceptability-of-use condition.

We should emphasize that it all hangs in the narrative
context. Children might reference ownership more if asked about why a person is
allowed to modify an object; but they might reference ownership less if asked
about gender typed objects or objects that are potentially dangerous, as other
explanatory factors might be more compelling for such items (i.e., gender
norms; safety concerns).

I’m interested in this topic because I think that ownership
plays an important role in the development of reasoning. Rather thank
considering reasoning as a cognitive, cold faculty that is applied to the
domain of ownership, I believe that reasoning develops in the context of the rhetorical
fight for object possession (competition, sharing, adjudication of ownership,
etc.) Children feel authorized to give
permission, forbid, and reason about objects in general in so far as they can
appropriate those objects and feel that they are their own. The fact that ownership
appears spontaneously in children’s reasoning is therefore relevant for my
research interests.